Archive for the ‘Visions’ Category
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9. July 2010 – 16:11 by Dorothee Ruetschle (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Photo by fRandi-Shooters on Flickr.com
Europas Netzwerk für ePartizipation PEP-NET – Pan European eParticipation Network – lädt am 23. September 2010 in die historische Speicherstadt der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg ein. Im Mittelpunkt der von Richard Wilson, dem Begründer von Involve and izwe, moderierten eintägigen Veranstaltung steht das Thema Online-Bürgerbeteiligung – ePartizipation.
Beleuchtet werden insbesondere die Facetten
- ePartizipation in Europa: strategische Ziele vs. Umsetzung
- Die Zukunft der ePartizipation: regional, national und international
- Vorzeigeprojekte der ePartizipation: Berichte aus dem Praxisfeld
Die internationale Tagung ist für die Bedürfnisse von Vertretern aus Verwaltung, Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Bürgerorganisationen konzeptioniert. Gerade in Zeiten knapper Kassen stehen verschiedene Ausprägungen der ePartizipation, wie Bürgerhaushalte, die Beteiligung der Bürger an Gesetzgebungsverfahren, Open Data, Bürgerbeteiligung in der Politikfeldgestaltung, cooperative government und Transparenz bei Kommunen, Ländern und Nationen auf der Agenda. PEP-NET widmet sich der Förderung der ePartizipation und schafft mit der Veranstaltung eine besondere Plattform für einen intensiven Austausch, weiterführende Diskussionen und anregende Gespräche mit hochrangigen Persönlichkeiten.
PEP-NET freut sich besonders, die Teilnahme beitragsfrei anbieten zu können. Eine Anmeldung für die limitierte Veranstaltung ist ab sofort über die Online-Registrierung unter http://pep-net.eu/pep-net-summit/ möglich.
Der offizielle Hashtag für die Veranstaltung ist #PEPSUM
Posted in experince, good practice, open data, Projects, TuTech, Uncategorized, Visions | No Comments »
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7. June 2010 – 16:36 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Vienna Airport: free wifi
Everyone is talking about citizen-led service redesign these days, the idea that social media can allow citizens to design services and thus help the public sector meet their needs better whilst reducing waste. IDEA (the UK’s Improvement and Development Agency) is following up the publication of Local by Social, a guide to using social media to solve local problems, by teaming up with FutureGov to host an event bringing together local government officials and social innovators.
Hopping on a plane for a day is not quite the same as taking the train to Bristol, which seemed to happen at the drop of a hat when PEP-NET member Delib organised an event to plan the future of Britain’s deliberative democracy. Would this or something similar work on an EU level, and what are the specific issues it would face?
Whilst local authorities deliver hundreds of services on a local level, the EU is more distant. The ratio of citizens to staff is much higher, which makes that contact more difficult. The ever-present language barrier is a problem, as it always is when co-operating with other EU countries. Finally, the distance that you would have to travel to have face-to-face meetings is a lot larger. And worst of all, you’d have to meet in a café rather than a pub!
But the first question you would have to answer would be “What to design?”. One candidate is the European Citizens’ Initiative (or an online version of it), which is a provision in the Lisbon Treaty stipulating that if 1 million European citizens sign a petition, it has to be considered by the Commission. echo source started the ball rolling on this blog by raising some questions that need answering.
Then there is the Commission itself. It has made a commitment to demonstrate eGovernment as part of the Digital Agenda, and started a blog asking how it should use social media in its communications. How do citizens want the Commission to implement eGovernment in the coming years?
Or how about something new? Say, mini-grants for communities that want to twin themselves with communities in other countries and run a hyperlocal blog with an international touch, and a bit of money for cultural exchanges? As ever, ideas aren’t in short supply but it’s a matter of finding the best ones and putting them into practice. So it all comes down to cracking some of those problems I mentioned above.
Whatever you think of the EU, the freedom of movement, single currency and cheap transport between member states, added to access to online tools — brilliant at allowing collaboration over long distances — means that there was never a time when citizen-led service redesign on an EU level was more possible!
Posted in Trends, Uncategorized, Visions | No Comments »
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21. May 2010 – 10:08 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Two of the 
major challenges for eParticipation today are scale (what to do if there are 100.000 contributions) and the problem of quantifying the positions in qualitative discussions (clearly knowing who supports what etc.). Automatic analysis and categorization of contributions could be a possible solution to these problems or at least a valuable support to human moderators and facilitators. The challenge of reliable automatic argument analysis has not been solved yet and a perfect solution might be out of reach for a long time, but with the announcement of the data prediction API at the Google I/O conference yesterday a workable solution could be available soon.
The data prediction API is a service that is able to categorize random text based on how it has been trained with known categorized data. For example: If the service was trained that “This is an english sentence” is “English” and that “La idioma mas fina” is “Spanish” it will be able to determine that “Qué Hay De Nuevo” is also “Spanish”. Of course this is a very simple example but the service is potentially able to categorize complex texts based on the training it has received with known data. Details about the process can be found in the developers guide (warning technical content). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Tools, Visions | No Comments »
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19. May 2010 – 13:36 by echo source
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As the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) has now come to the phase of its final shaping, we now have the chance to contribute to its success in being a tool for true citizens participation in European politics. However, current discussions on the regulations drafted by the Commission do show some confusion about what this legislative instrument actually can provide and which risks it contains.
Generally ECI is understood as an instrument for decision-making or voting, as we know it from direct democratic instruments like referenda. Thus, the main use of ICT for the ECI is seen in the authentication and collection of votes (e-voting).
But in fact ECI is not essentially a means for decision-making. Its legal consequences are limited to submission of proposals to the Commission, which in turn is not even obligated to pass this proposal to the parliament. Thus, ECI does only allow citizens to participate in political agenda setting and rather has to be understood as a process of collective opinion formation. Accordingly, current discussions on authentication and representativeness miss to address the crucial questions at stake, because ECI is not comparable to an election or referendum.
However, this does not mean that ECI is not worth anything. As an instrument for participatory agenda setting, ECI does offer citizens an opportunity to deliberate on questions, which they feel concerned about and to proactively bring them on the political agenda. ECI could open a space for trans-cultural, trans-border discourse embracing all the different viewpoints Europeans from various member states may have, and thus, has the potential to establish a European public sphere. It is about creating a process of discursive appropriation of Europe by its citizens, making them co-authors of the European endeavour.
Thus, ECI must be understood much more as a participatory process, requiring an intelligent and consistent combination of offline and online methods for constructive collaboration at local, national and European level.
Furthermore, to prevent ECI from being misunderstood as a mere oppositional instruments, it will be equally important to guarantee a synergic interplay between civil organizations and governmental institutions.
Therefore, further concretion and development of ECI must focus much more on the participative process of collective opinion formation and deliberative agenda setting.
Accordingly, the role of ICT in these processes has to be reconsidered. We will not only need e-voting systems and virtual IDs, but also powerful tools for cross-language dialogue, structured debate, collective co-creation of proposals and position papers as well as tools for effective e-campaigning and proactive self-organization.
Posted in Debate Europe, News, Visions | 3 Comments »
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19. May 2010 – 10:33 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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by HubSpot on flickr.com
Over the course of the last weeks and months the discussion about privacy on Facebook and other social networks has become ever more intense and heated. A quick look on Google news for example reveals more than 4.000 news articles about this issue. One of the initiators for this debate was decision by Facebook to (again) change its approach to privacy by making more information about its users public by default. If you would like to get a feeling about the level of publicity Facebook profiles have reached just take a quick look at youropenbook.org (a search engine for all public status updates) or reclaimprivacy.org (a tool that allows you to scan your privacy settings and show you what is public).
In this climate of rising distrust towards Facebook many digerati and web users have stated the need for an alternative social networking infrastructure that allows for more control by the user without making the management of your online privacy to complicated.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Trends, Visions | No Comments »
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18. May 2010 – 17:04 by Francesco Molinari
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Dear PEP-NET partners and associate members,
Apologies for this misuse of a public site for internal information distribution, but we thought it was good to make the process transparent to our non partner readers as well.
As you may know, the EU-funded project is coming to an end soon, but there is the intention to continue the PEP-NET experience by creating a more solid form of partnership, like an international non profit association, holding no financial risk for its members.
To appreciate what and how should be done in that direction, a survey has been launched among the PEP-NET (full and associate) members, by means of a personal invitation emailed to everyone on Friday 14th at 14:59 CET. In case you have lost or forgot about it, you will get a personal reminder pretty soon.
There is time for your response till Friday, 21st May at 12:00 CET.
What was not in the invitation, because it is today’s decision only, is that the survey results will be discussed and turned into action items for the foundation of the new PEP-NET association during a dedicated meeting of a “Temporary Steering Committee”, scheduled on Friday 25th & Saturday 26th of June in Berlin. There will also be a dedicated video conference session, open to all interested PEP-NET “fans”, on Friday, 25th of June at 16:00-17:00 CET, and that I cordially invite you to attend!
A note about logistics: People who want to take part in the video conference session have to register in advance. Daniel Roleff from politik-digital will set up the technology according to the number of participants. For registration, send an e-mail to Daniel (droleff AT politik-digital.de) and state your instant messaging ID (Skype, Vsee, GoogleTalk or Jabber). Please register soon, latest by Friday, 18th of June. There will be no further notice.
Thanks for your participation!
On behalf of the Temporary Steering Committee,
Francesco Molinari
info AT pep-net.eu
Posted in Events, Visions | No Comments »
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17. May 2010 – 10:14 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Photo of Chuck Hirt
I spoke to Chuck Hirt, from the Central and Eastern European Citizens’ Network (CEECN, a member of PEP-NET) about eParticipation in Central and Eastern Europe. Chuck says that eParticipation along Western European lines is “science fiction” in C&E Europe. On the other hand, people who visit the region are often “inspired by the spirit, energy and enthusiasm” there.
John Heaven: Hi Chuck. Please tell me a bit about CEECN.
Chuck Hirt: The Central and Eastern European Citizens Network gives grass-roots citizens organisations the opportunity to work together, share ideas, and enhance their organisational growth. It started by bringing together staff and citizens from a few organisations across Central and Eastern Europe, who found the meetings really helpful – if anything, just to gain inspiration and energy to take home and continue the struggle.
We found out that several of us were funded by a US donor organisation, the Charles Stewart Mott foundation. They said they would be happy to promote this activity, but asked that we included organisations from further away in the east. We were happy to do this, and our members now come from 19 different countries.
The network is going strong, and we are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year. We are just making preparations for a Citizens’ Participation University. At the moment we are doing some research into the state of participation to act as a base line.
JH: What is the key to the network’s success?
CH: The network was a good place for exchanging stories and experience, putting on training from the start and particularly running a conference every two years. But things started taking off as we began to find way to become proactive and institute events like “Citizen Participation Week”. This was a lot of hard work but gave us a focus. This was quite an exciting moment.
JH: What achievements does CEECN have to its name?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in experince, Interview, members, Uncategorized, Visions | No Comments »
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14. May 2010 – 22:07 by Civil College
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opinion of Madarász Csaba
However the debate is reaching new heights by the expressed needs of the European Civil Society actors – gathered last week in Salzburg at the European Citizen’s Initiative Summit 2010 - by formulating the fears and proposed changes in the Salzburg Manifesto and presented at the public hearing yesterday organized in Bruxelles.
European Civil society is now criticising various aspects of the Commission proposed regulation, such as the admissibility check procedure, the provided time for the consultation, the needed infrastructure. The vast citizen group is putting attention to the forthcoming challenges: they have already started to build the needed infrastructure to support the practical application of the ECI (read more about it in the Manifesto).
(grab the documents here)
Ladies and Gentlemen! Dear Collegues!
I am wondering, where are we eGovernment, eParticipation and eDemocracy experts in this process? I mean, do we know, what the ECI is about? I am not really sure..But if we get know it’s current state, we might start to feel the natural challenge, to improve it..
What sort of challenge?
To lift ECI, the direct democratic instrument from 0.1 to ECI2.0: with the support of eGovernment.
The current verision of the Commission’s draft regulation is really not designed to our age – I have a personal impression, that communication is not really good between the different DGs. I do not know, what other reasons could limitthe current vision of the ECI, and preventing it to become a flagship of European trans/policy-governmental project. It really could be!But how?
Here is my recipe:
0. we have the heat and the need coming from citizens to cook together (policy), - this is the ECI
1. We have the Malmö Ministerial declaration, which is showing the path to countries (and even the European Commissioin) towards the web 2.0 and citizen friendly governance (by the way, the Hungarian Government, or responsible actors did not even translated it into Hungarian! Does this makes sense? I mean, do really citizens has to monitor these sort of things??)
2. We have the spice making it tasty for “upgrading” public services in Europe: it is the Open Declaration on Public Services
3. We aslo have the recently adopted Granada Declaration – highlighting the need for e-IDs and e-Signatures, interoperability and open standards, making the issue accessible and interoperable.
4. We also have the EIS - the European Interoperability Strategy as a technical bowl for these kind of issues, like the ECI
So what’s now?
I think it is time to move in. This ship can go, and all the money, that EU has spent on eDemocracy and eParticipation networks, projects, policy and research could loose it’s value if we do not stand up for the needed and obvious improvement of the first direct democracy instrument, provided after the Lisbon Treaty.
This is the practical time, when we need to add our knowledge to the process. No need to fear, it is time for change.
Directions
Questions regarding positioning the ECI 2.0:
- Is ECI a serivce of Governments or the European Government? Is European Commission a governing organization?
- If it is (any of the above) than ECI is a service for citizens and it is related to eGovernment, eDemocracy and eParticipation!
- If it is related to the areas – why we have not heard the existing expert networks opinion on this issue? EC pays a lot to sustain, create these networks. EC has to ask advice not only in the light of recent declaration from us on how to create the best ECI!
- Does the EC play and administrative role? If yes, than these recently adopted declarations and recommendations are also true for the EC. We need to take a fresh look on the ECI-EC relation in accordance to the questions lifted here!
Important facts about ECI 2.0:
Core technical basics
- In align with European Strategy for Interoperability of public services, interoperable system for the management of initiatives need to lay down the basics of ECI 2.0 (this means a standardized interface and functionality, which can be embedded and reached from various portals – for example the one-stop-shop egovernment portals/central government websites after “regular”, national authentication)
- The application should be based on open standards for further development by independent parties (we need APIs!)
- The system shall pave the way or embed the basics of the European-e-ID
Core designing basics
- design the service with different stakeholders
- set the basic technical framework and apply the best corwdsourcing methodologies to engage interested countries, developers …
- make it a good governance example!
We should not forget, why else eGovernment is important:
1. With the right approach to develop a supporting system – framework for ECI 2.0 -, the time needed for international signature collection, verification can be dramatically reduced
2. Costs related to campaigning and organizing can be also cut back seriously, by embedded supporting instruments (even created by the civil society)
3. ECI 2.0 approach takes down the responsibility from the organizers shoulder to provide a secure and reliable electronic system for collecting and validating signatures.
4. ECI 2.0 becomes an intergovernmental and G2C, C2C, G2G service – which means, that any country/provider can develop extra functionalities for making the application better (later about these)
5. ECI 2.0 can save a lot of trees, energy and water.
How can ECI 2.0 save our European trees, reduce water and energy consumption?
- using the possibilities of e-government and e-administration is an eco friendly approach
- 1 000 000 signature on the current format needs approximately 1million sheets of A4 paper.
- that means 4 tons of paper/initiative which app. means (if it is white paper) 8800 kgs of wood, 140000 liter of water, and 32000 kW of energy from the production side.
- extra costs and ecological footprint of moving, storing and guarding papers and their human “partners”
Please comment and check some of the related videos here:
http://eci.mirocommunity.org/
Posted in ICT, Projects, Trends, Visions | No Comments »
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11. May 2010 – 10:06 by Dorothee Ruetschle (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Die deutsche Originalfassung des Artikels “Grants for Greece – Where does our money flow?” finden Sie im Blog “government2020″ unter http://www.government2020.de/blog/?p=61.
Jörn von Lucke beschreibt, wie den Einsatz von Open Government in Texas und zeigt, wie dieses Konzept den Europäern mehr Transparenz über die Verwendung von Finanzhilfen in Griechenland ermöglichen könnte:
“In Zeiten einer weltweiten Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise sollte uns der US-Bundesstaat Texas ein Vorbild sein. Susan Combs, Controllerin des US-Staates Texas, hat sich zu einer Vorreiterin transparenter Staatshaushalte gemacht. Mit dem Portal „Transparency at Work“ (Cashdrill: http://www.window.state.tx.us/comptrol/expendlist/cashdrill.php) ist es seit 2007 allen Bürgern und der Presse möglich, den aktuellen Staatshaushalt von Texas nach unterschiedlichen Suchkriterien tagesaktuell auszuwerten. …”
Den vollständigen Text können Sie hier nachlesen.
Posted in experince, good practice, open data, Projects, Trends, Visions | No Comments »
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10. May 2010 – 13:44 by Dorothee Ruetschle (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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Prof. Dr. Jörn von Lucke wrote an interesting article concerning the current discussion about Greece:
Grants for Greece – Where does our money flow?
Author: Professor Dr. Jörn von Lucke
In times of a global financial and economic crisis, the U.S. State of Texas might be a role model. Susan Combs, Comptroller of the State of Texas, is a pioneer for more transparent budgets. Since 2007, the portal “Cash Drill: Transparency at Work” has enabled all citizens and the press to evaluate the state budget of Texas and to analyze it according to various criteria (Cash Drill: http://www.window.state.tx.us/comptrol/expendlist/cashdrill.php). Various search tools are available under the “Where the Money Goes” banner. They help to create spending overviews by agency, by category, by vendors and by purchasing items. Additionally, comparisons of previous expenditures are possible with the planned budget of an agency. Such an evaluation is made possible through a data warehouse that contains these information accessible in multiple languages. Citizens also have the opportunity to communicate their experiences, impressions and to give tips for suspected corruption directly. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Debate Europe, Events, good practice, ICT, open data, Projects, Tools, Trends, Visions | 3 Comments »
